SCOTUS on Immigrants and Legal Status

Coming by way of Sarah Burris at AlterNet, etc.

It was not that long ago when Kavanaugh penned an opinion giving more leeway to immigration agents. His claim for doing so was “they rarely take American citizens into custody. If such were to occur by mistake a citizen is taken, they are released very quickly.” That ruling was September 8, 2025), It paused a ruling by a federal judge in Los Angeles imposing restrictions on the ability of federal agents to make immigration stops plaintiffs say are based on racial profiling. It would appear justice Kavanaugh was mistaken in his assumption.

Here is a bit of a backup to this as taken from Scotus Blog’s Ame Howell

The order by U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong barred agents in the Central District of California (an area with a population of approximately 20 million people) from making such stops without reasonable suspicion that the person being stopped is in the United States illegally. Reasonable suspicion, Frimpong added, cannot rest solely on any combination of four factors: “apparent race or ethnicity,” speaking in Spanish or accented English, being present at a location where undocumented immigrants “are known to gather” (such as pick-up spots for day laborers), and working at specific jobs, such as landscaping or construction. All of what Frimpong suggests is what is being ignored today by ICE and other. It is a free forall and Trump is cheering them on>

The order by the Supreme Court put the Frimpong ruling on hold while the Trump administration’s appeals continued. In an opinion agreeing with the decision to grant the government’s request for a stay, Justice Brett Kavanaugh emphasized what he characterized as the narrow role of judges in immigration cases. Judges, he wrote, “may have views on which policy approach is better or fairer. But judges are not appointed to make those policy calls. We merely ensure,” he stressed, “that the Executive Branch acts within the confines of the Constitution and federal statutes.”

Maybe today Justice Kavanaugh might change his mind? Not likely.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented in a 21-page opinion joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Sotomayor described the court’s action as “yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket. We should not have to live in a country,” she wrote, “where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost,” she concluded, “I dissent.”

A further diagnosis on how we arrived to a free-for-all deportation. The case itself stems from federal immigration raids beginning in the Los Angeles area in June as part of what some government officials have called the “largest Mass Deportation Operation” in U.S. history. Describing the government’s actions as creating “an illegal detention and deportation dragnet,” a group including both U.S. citizens and undocumented immigrants who had been targeted by the raids went to federal court the following month.

They contended, among other things, the raids violated the Fourth Amendment’s ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures,” which the Supreme Court has held generally prohibits immigration officials from stopping someone in public. That is unless they have reasonable suspicion the person being stopped has violated federal law or immigration law. In their complaint, the challengers were claiming reasonable suspicion must be based on “specific articulable facts,” rather than “broad profiles which cast suspicion on entire categories of people.”

So, here we are today with the Trump administration following their version of the rule of law as it harasses, captures, and deports as many people Trump and Republicans deem as being illegal and undesirable. And the court stands by and watches.